“If medicine,” said Froude, “had been regulated three hundred years ago by Act of Parliament; if there had been Thirty-Nine Articles of Physic, and every licensed practitioner had been compelled, under pains and penalties, to compound his drugs by the prescriptions of Henry the Eighth’s physician, Doctor Butts, it is easy to conjecture in what state of health the people of this country would at present be found.”

Christendom does not yet realise how greatly, how grievously, it has suffered in spiritual health by having sent to Coventry or to the stake so many theological Simpsons, Listers, and Pasteurs simply because they could not rest their minds in the hypotheses of very ill-educated men who strove to grapple with the highest of all intellectual problems at a time when knowledge was at its lowest level.

It will perhaps rouse the vitality of the Church when it finds twenty or thirty years from now that the great protagonists of Christianity in its future battles with science and philosophy are drawn from the ranks of nonconformity.

Dr. Selbie is certainly preparing his students for these encounters, and preparing them, too, with an emphasis on one particular aspect of the old theology, and a central one, which the apologists of more orthodox communions have either overlooked or find it convenient to ignore.

One of his first postulates is that man inhabits a moral universe, and from this postulate he has no difficulty in moving forward not only to contemplate the hypothesis of immortality, but to confront the difficulty of punishment for sin.  In a little book of his called Belief and Life he has the following passages: 

     In the long last men cannot be persuaded to deny their own moral
     nature, and they will not be content with a theory of the universe
     which does not satisfy their sense of right.

And because of this very sense of right they entertain no soft and sentimental notions concerning the universe: 

They believe in judgment, in retribution, and in the great principle that “as a man sows, so shall he also reap.”  They therefore require that room shall be found in the scheme of things for the working out of this principle.  They recognise that such room is not to be found in this present life, and so they accept the fact that God hath set eternity in our hearts, and that we are built on a scale which requires a more abundant life to complete it.

In corroboration of their faith, it may be said, as John Stuart Mill used to argue, that wherever belief in the future has been strong and vivid, it has made for human progress.  There is no doubt that the deterioration of religion and the more material views of life so prevalent just now are due to the loss of faith in the future.

Religion, he says, can never live or be effective within the narrow circle of time and sense.  Nevertheless he has the courage to say:  “The future life, like the belief in God, is best treated as an hypothesis that is yet in process of verification.”